Posted on 07/05/2013 7:45:17 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Classes in engineering and the sciences eat up a disproportionate portion of college resources. But schools that charge students a premium to study them might be making mistake.
Imagine opening a restaurant menu and finding that every dish, from the steak frites to frisse salad, costs $14.99. It would seem odd, right? After all, buying and cooking a ribeye is more expensive than throwing some lettuce in a bowl. Charging the same for each wouldn't make sense.
Yet, that's pretty much how most colleges price their majors. Undergrads pay the same flat rate per credit no matter what they study, even though different courses can require vastly different resources to teach. Giant freshman lectures are cheaper to run per-student than intimate senior seminars, and reading-heavy majors like history are cheaper than lab-oriented disciplines like biology. At New York's state colleges, to give one real-world example, advanced engineering or hard science courses cost more than five times as much to teach than low-level psychology classes. None of this tends to be reflected on tuition bills.
Should it? Would colleges, or students, be better off if higher ed finally nixed one price fits all?
This week, University of Michigan economist Kevin Stange released a new working paper that illustrates what one of the potential downsides of doing so might be. Over the last two decades, a growing minority of schools have in fact experimented with varying tuition by major. A Cornell study (which produced the graph below) found that 41 percent of public doctoral universities have tried charging a premium for at least one program -- usually engineering, business, or nursing. Looking at a sample of these schools, Stange's paper concludes that raising the price of certain majors seems to influence what students choose to study, though not always in predictable ways.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
The Atlantic publishes the most ourtragoeus articles.
English Lit majors? Why not give them 4 years of partying for free? They're going to be on government assistance for most of their lives anyway, so why delay the inevitable? Let 'em have their fun! The party never stops when you lack the ability or the will to contribute to society!
Lib arts majors should be charged more to cover the cost of the welfare they will be on after they graduate
From The Atlantic.
The Atlantic......full of old wrecks, garbage and s**t. It’s also the name of an ocean.
Lab fees. They already do.
If anything Universities should charge more for worthless degrees.
Lets look at charging premiums for women’s studies, black history, political science, GLBT studies, communications and other worthless will never amount to a hill of beans degrees.
If you look at donations from previously awarded degrees by department I think you’d find that humanities would come up way short of anyone with a worth something in the real world degree.
40 years ago, I paid extra lab fees for engineering labs.
RE: The Atlantic......full of old wrecks, garbage and s**t. It’s also the name of an ocean.
Would it help if they renamed the magazine to The Pacific? :)
Hey, the world needs more barristas to sell $8 soy lattes to other English Lit. majors.
</sarc>
They are having a harder time making payments on their loans.
Therefore the burden should be shifted to those who are doing better.
Here's a thought: hard science and engineering programs attract the vast bulk of grant money.
Humanities professors get paid as much - and often more - than engineering professors, but they produce a tiny fraction of the grants.
Humanities are already being heavily subsidized - perhaps humanities students should be forced to shoulder the burden.
be making mistake
I would like to buy a vowel.
I think athletics is more expensive than the sciences.
Quite the opposite. Engineers will make more and pay back into the system by having real jobs.
The Atlantic publishes the most ourtragoeus articles.
Well, heck, afraidfortherepublic! You wouldn't want to see stupid ideas begging on the street, would you? Moronic anti-American ideas have to live somewhere, don't they? If not for the Atlantic, where would heavily feral government-subsidized National Public Radio find "creative" ideas?
They should charge a stupid tax on anyone majoring in philosophy, sociology, peace studies, womyn’s studies, black studies, LGBT studies, etc.
So,yes...I can see engineering students paying higher tuition.
When I went to Engineering College, we had a lot more required credit hours to graduate than the average degree.
We also got a lot of donations to different departments of engineering as companies wanted specific items taught. The concession made to some of the upper level classes that would also count as MS credit, they were taught at night. This let local companies send their employees and still work while getting a Masters.
I doubt this happened a lot in degrees that have little demand after college. So our high demand engineering student created donations for the university.
LOLOLOLOL! My mother used to send me a subscription to the Atlantic. I used to remove my name and dump them at the Dr’s office. hen I though about a little deeper and decided that I did not want to corrupt the minds of sick people. Now, I just dump them into the garbage.
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